High school students are teenagers, and if we were to go strictly along biological lines, teenagers are adult animals. And if we were all still living in caves, teenagers would have moved out of their parents’ cave and found their own well before the modern-day version of adulthood (the 18th birthday).

Modern times and the laws regarding adult status do nothing to curb the biological imperative that makes all teens desperate to move out and escape the parental cave. Higher education is a popular no-parent destination. It has the excellent advantage of being fully approved of by parental units and is lacking in parental supervision.

High school students who are still in the planning phase of their exodus (aren’t graduating in a few weeks) can spend the next several months creating superbly detailed spreadsheets filled with any and all glorious escape possibilities.

College Navigator is a marvelously thorough tool from the U.S. Dept. of Education that allows the user to compare and contrast every public and private college or university in the country. It’s so easy a monkey could figure it out, and it allows the user to compare all the pertinent number-crunched info for any school (too many categories for me to list here). Which means all research will have been done except the fun campus-visit part of the process.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

U.S. News & World Report came out with their annual “Best College” rankings edition online today, the magazine will be on the newsstands on August 20th. Any changes? This group of schools looks strikingly similar to the 2007 rankings despite the magazine’s vows to make “substantial changes in methodology.” The top ten is still dominated by brand names and Ivies, and the top 3 spots haven’t budged. Umm, let’s see, the University of Pennsylvania moved up from #7 to #5…

The Best Values section will be far more valuable to students who are researching which colleges to attend: Where Applying Early May Help, Schools That Award the Most (and Least) Need-Based Aid and Schools Whose Freshmen Are Least (and Most) Likely to Return

Best National Universities 2008

1. Princeton University (NJ)
2. Harvard University (MA)
3. Yale University (CT)
4. Stanford University (CA)
5. California Institute of Technology
6. University of Pennsylvania
7. Massachusetts Inst. Of Technology
8. Duke University (NC)
9. Columbia University (NY)
10. University of Chicago
11. Dartmouth College (NH)
12. Cornell University (NY)
13. Washington University in St. Louis
14. Brown University (RI)
15. Johns Hopkins University (MD)
16. Northwestern University (IL)
17. Emory University (GA)
18. Rice University (TX)
19. University of Notre Dame (IN)
20. Vanderbilt University (TN)
21. University of California – Berkeley
22. Carnegie Mellon University (PA)
23. Georgetown University (DC)
24. University of Virginia
25. University of California – Los Angeles
25. University of Michigan – Ann Arbor

Universities with Highest Retention Rates 2008
When looking at college rankings and college stats, an important factor in determining quality is a retention rate above 80%. Of course there is a lot of overlap with the Best National Universities list at the top, but you’ll find many gems with retention rates above 80%.

1. Yale University (CT) - 98%
2. University of Pennsylvania - 98%
3. University of Notre Dame (IN) - 98%
4. Stanford University (CA) - 98%
5. Princeton University (NJ) - 98%
6. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology - 98%
7. Harvard University (MA) - 98%
8. Dartmouth College (NH) - 98%
9. Columbia University (NY) - 98%
10. Washington University in St. Louis - 97%
11. University of Virginia - 97%
12. University of Chicago - 97%
13. Univ. of California–Los Angeles - 97%
14. University of California–Berkeley - 97%
15. Rice University (TX) - 97%
16. Northwestern University (IL) - 97%
17. Georgetown University (DC) - 97%
18. Duke University (NC) - 97%
19. California Institute of Technology - 97%
20. Brown University (RI) - 97%
21. U. of North Carolina–Chapel Hill - 96%
22. University of Michigan–Ann Arbor - 96%
23. Tufts University (MA) - 96%
24. Johns Hopkins University (MD) - 96%
25. Cornell University (NY) - 96%
26. Vanderbilt University (TN) - 95%
27. Univ. of Southern California - 95%
28. College of William and Mary (VA) - 95%
29. Brandeis University (MA) - 95%
30. Boston College - 95%
31. Wake Forest University (NC) - 94%
32. University of Rochester (NY) - 94%
33. University of Florida - 94%
34. Univ. of California–San Diego - 94%
35. University of California–Irvine - 94%
36. Lehigh University (PA) - 94%
37. Emory University (GA) - 94%
38. Carnegie Mellon University (PA) - 94%

Numerical rankings of colleges are out. Hot lists are in. Newsweek created a list of “today’s most interesting schools” that they call the “hottest” universities in the U.S. In light of the spanking that U.S. News and World Report received, Newsweek took pains to point out that this list is subjective.

What’s wrong with good old “best”?

We’ve talked to a range of experts—admissions officials, educational consultants, students, parents, and college and university leaders—in making our selections. We’ve been particularly influenced by the views of high-school counselors, the people most in tune with what matters to the latest wave of college applicants.

Hottest Ivy
Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

Hottest for Sports Fans
University of Florida, Gainesville, Fla.

Hottest Men’s College
Morehouse College, Atlanta, Ga

Hottest for No SAT or ACT Needed
Bates College, Lewiston, Maine

Hottest for Science and Engineering
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.

Hottest Liberal-Arts School You Never Heard Of
Centenary College of Louisiana, Shreveport, La.

Hottest for Rejecting You
Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

Hottest for Election Year
Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, Calif.

Hottest on The Rebound
Tulane University, New Orleans, La.

Hottest for Free Tuition
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, N.Y.

Hottest Mega-University
University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Calif.

Hottest Catholic School
Fordham University, New York, N.Y.

Hottest Big-City School
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Hottest for Pre-Meds
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.

Hottest in the War on Terror
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro, N.M.

Hottest Small State School
State University of New York at New Paltz, New Paltz, N.Y.

Hottest for Liberal Arts
Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.

Hottest for First-Generation Students
Queens College (City University of New York), Queens, N.Y.

Hottest for Loving the Great Outdoors
St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St. Mary’s, Md.

Hottest Women’s College
Smith College, Northampton, Mass

Hottest Music School
Eastman School of Music, Rochester, N.Y.

Hottest for Saving America’s Schools
University of Texas-Austin, Austin, Texas

Hottest Big State School
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wis.

Hottest for International Studies
University of Richmond, Richmond, VA.

Hottest for Business
Babson College, Babson Park, Mass.

college | university

I accept none of this. I’ve been doing a lot of ranting and raving, bitching and moaning about the college admissions insanity in this country. If I could laugh about it I’d feel better. Maybe this book will help. I love that someone wrote a book satirizing the bizarreness that is the college admissions process (albeit for only a teensy fraction of the population). Not necessarily high-end literature, but isn’t it enough that someone wrote a satirical novel about this subject? At any rate, it makes me feel better. The rest of you can use your free will to suffer or laugh (at yourselves or the other poor bastards who’ve allowed themselves to be sucked into the vortex). Do I still sound cranky?

Acceptance: A Novel (Sarah Crichton Books 2007) by Susan Coll

Publisher Comments:

A comic chronicle of a year in the life in the college admissions cycle.
It’s spring break of junior year and the college admissions hysteria is setting in. “AP” Harry (so named for the unprecedented number of advanced placement courses he has taken) and his mother take a detour from his first choice, Harvard, to visit Yates, a liberal arts school in the Northeast that is enjoying a surge in popularity as a result of a statistical error that landed it on the top-fifty list of the U.S. News & World Report rankings. There, on Yates’s dilapidated grounds, Harry runs into two of his classmates from Verona High, an elite public school in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There’s Maya Kaluantharana, a gifted athlete whose mediocre SAT scores so alarm her family that they declare her learning disabled, and Taylor Rockefeller, Harry’s brooding neighbor, who just wants a good look at the dormitory bathrooms.

With the human spirit of Tom Perrotta and the engaging honesty of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, Susan Coll reveals the frantic world of college admissions, where kids recalibrate their GPAs based on daily quizzes, families relocate to enhance the chance for Ivy League slots, and everyone is looking for the formula for admittance. Meanwhile, Yates admissions officer Olivia Sheraton sifts through applications looking for something — anything — to distinguish one applicant from the next. For all, the price of admission requires compromise; for a few, the ordeal blossoms into an unexpected journey of discovery.

Posted by Alexa Harrington
College

The Princeton Review, for 25 years, has been coming out with a list of best value schools, both public and private.

Here’s their newest list of “best value” public schools:

1. New College of Florida
2. Truman State University, Kirksville, Mo.
3. University of North Carolina at Asheville
4. University of Virginia, Charlottesville
5. University of California — Berkeley
6. University of California — San Diego
7. University of California — Santa Cruz
8. University of Minnesota, Morris
9. University of Wisconsin — Madison
10. St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St. Mary’s City, Md.

And now a drumroll for the “best value” private colleges:

1. Rice Univ. (Houston, TX)
2. Williams College (Williamstown, MA)
3. Grinnell College (Grinnell, IA)
4. Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, PA)
5. Thomas Aquinas College (Santa Paula, CA)
6. Wabash College (Crawfordsville, IN)
7. Whitman College (Walla Walla, WA)
8. Amherst College (Amherst, MA)
9. Scripps College (Claremont, CA)
10. Harvard College (Cambridge, MA)

It’s difficult to value these rankings without know what criteria was used. Here’s a quote explaining the logic behind the numbers.

Said Robert Franek, Princeton Review VP-Publishing, “Families searching for colleges with excellent academics, generous financial aid packages and / or relatively low costs of attendance will find outstanding choices in this book. We selected the 165 schools for this edition and its two top 10 ranking lists based on data we collected from 650 institutions during the 2005-2006 academic year and our surveys of students attending them. To winnow our list of “best values,” we considered more than 30 factors in four areas: academics, tuition, financial aid and student borrowing.”

With students graduating from college with more loans than ever before, this might not be a bad list to make a note of. The average student graduates with about $19,000 in loans. Check out this article for some advice on how to pick a school you can afford. One piece of very good advice the author offers is to stick to federal loans - you’ll be thankful when your loans start accumulating interest. Private loans will have higher interest rates and might start accruing interest immediately rather than when you graduate.

Posted By Sindya Bhanoo
School | school, college, greek

This New York Times article is about how driven girls in one affluent Massachusetts suburb are. They are smart, athletic, musically inclined and determined to get into the best colleges in the country.

The expectation to succeed however, may just be a bit too much:

To spend several months in a pressure cooker like Newton North is to see what a girl can be — what any young person can be — when encouraged by committed teachers and by engaged parents who can give them wide-ranging opportunities. It is also to see these girls struggle to navigate the conflicting messages they have been absorbing, if not from their parents then from the culture, since elementary school. The first message: Bring home A’s. Do everything. Get into a top college — which doesn’t have to be in the Ivy League, or one of the other elites like Williams, Tufts or Bowdoin, but should be a “name” school. The second message: Be yourself. Have fun. Don’t work too hard.
The girls were honest in what they said:

And, for all their accomplishments and ambitions, the amazing girls, as their teachers and classmates call them, are not immune to the third message: While it is now cool to be smart, it is not enough to be smart.

“Effortlessly hot,” Kat added.

One mother, in her blog, argued that this pressure was better than the alternative:

I didn’t find this article all that alarming, unlike many of the letter writers in today’s Times. Sure, these girls are under a lot of pressure, much of it unrealistic, but isn’t that better than the alternative? Besides, I think these girls are the exception rather than the rule–far too many girls, especially in schools that don’t have the money that flows into Newton North, suffer from low expectations, not high.

Also read the notes to the editor (some very passionate) on the article here.

By Sindya Bhanoo
College | University

Please make it stop.

The high-pressure college admission insanity is verging on ridiculous. The parents are rabid. The kids are somewhere between highly-trained seals who can perform on command but may not be able to think for themselves, and freaked out lumps of carbon, hoping the extreme parental pressure will turn them into diamonds. Private college counselors are being hired, theoretically, to help guide high school students through the college application process. I imagine most parents feel it’s necessary simply because it’s available and if they don’t hire a private counselor, they won’t have done absolutely everything in their power to get Little Sally into the very best college. They can’t stop now—they’ve been working at getting Sally into an Ivy since before she was in the womb. She had the best Petri dish, the best play group, the best preschool, the best primary and secondary schools. If they don’t do everything to get her into the best college or university (and by best I mean schools with names that are familiar even to starving children in third world countries who have more critical things to think about) she could end up in some private, unheard-of liberal arts college or, god forbid, some state school in the middle of America where they eat potatoes and watch football. Because everyone knows you can only be adequately educated at an elite school—the other three thousand schools are just there to fill in some voids we had on the landscape.

What size font do I have to use to get people to understand that where a student matriculates from the ages of 18 to 22 doesn’t matter enough for it to be the life or death situation some parents are making it out to be? I’m barely keeping the foul language reigned in. School is good. Knowledge and the whole concept of learning how to learn (which is the main reason for going to college) are excellent reasons to aim for higher education. If a person feels that college is where they want to be, then by all means, jump on in. Yea school. The problem I’m having (besides holding back the foul language) is understanding how and why parents these days are so totally involved in their kids’ college admissions process. The parents are frantic and the kids are basket cases. Is everyone really so worried that Sally won’t get into at least one school? Is there that large a discrepancy between the number of college-bound seniors and the number of freshmen spots in the 3,000-plus colleges and universities across the U.S.?

I’ve looked and looked, and there is nary an article or a statistic that mentions too many college-bound high school seniors for the number of freshmen slots at colleges and universities in the U.S. I would imagine that if there was, in fact, a shortage of spots for incoming freshmen, panic would ensue and it would be all over the news. I did come across several articles about helicopter parenting and hyper parents and kids being too stressed out to take a lunch break or a yoga class. Basically, only a very tiny (but oddly loud and incredibly jumpy) portion of the U.S. population is involved in this insane Ivy Game. I want to not care at all, but I have vicarious nausea and stress for the unfortunately fortunate offspring of the helicopter parents. Run, kids. Run far, far away. But first, by all means feel free to jump through their hoops and get into the elite school your parents were aiming you toward. Let them pay for your exorbitantly overpriced education (since they really seem to want to). And then, when you’ve been educated within an inch of your life, maybe they’ll land the damn helicopter and you can have your life back.

More Disturbing Articles to Read:

The Wrong Conversation

Anxiety Rising on U.S. College Campuses

Education Statistics

Posted by Alexa Harrington

NPR does some great stories on education. I dug up this old series on college essays. Listen to some highschool read out their exceptional college essays.

More recently, they did an excellent series on the college admissions game. They cover everything from how to keep the process low stress to how to write that winning essay.

I hated writing my college essays. How do you explain to someone why you want to specifically attend their college when you are 17 or 18 years old and truly don’t know what you want to do with your life? Colleges usually end up getting cookie-cutter essays that don’t really help them distinguish Student A from Student B, C and D.

Perhaps it’s the colleges that have been approaching things all wrong said some deans from Tufts University.
So, Tufts has implemented a new idea: What if instead of writing an essay, students were asked to draw a picture? Or write a short story, about, say, “The Disappearing Professor” or “The End of MTV”?

Sternberg designed the new questions based on research he did as a psychology professor at Yale. He says his questions can predict academic success and measure different aspects of intelligence. Since Tufts’ mission is to train future leaders, Sternberg’s questions are meant to assess leadership potential, which he breaks into a mix of creativity, practicality, analytical skills and a certain kind of wisdom that’s different from book smarts.

I’m curious to see how this process works out for Tufts, and whether other universities will begin to adopt it.

NPR also has this seven part series on how to choose the college that is right for you.

One of the stories contained some of the best advice I could offer any young student today. What college you go to, in the end, does not matter that much - it is what you do there that will make all the difference in the world. Here’s the excerpt from the story:

Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, says it doesn’t matter where you go to college, only “what you do there.” Botstein says American colleges and universities are among the best in the world.

“College is a chance to really make something of yourself,” he says. “And you can do that anywhere, at a state university campus, or in a not well-known, small- or medium-size private institution.”

Posted by Sindya Bhanoo
College | University